Chavez has been providing discounted oil to poor areas throughout the US (and Latin America). But the Chicago Transit Authority has rejected the help, deciding to raise transit fares instead. The result?

"I only earn $560 a month and of that, over $200 a month goes to my bus fare," Cox told The NewStandard. "I have a 15-year-old and a 17-year-old who also need to get to school. If they change the prices and take away transfers, there are going to be a lot of days missed. I already see no money at the end of the month."

...isn't giving up our freedom to protect us from their attacks self-defeating?

President Bush recently confirmed that he has authorized wiretaps against U.S. citizens on at least 30 occasions and said he'll continue doing it. His justification? He, as president -- or is that king? -- has a right to disregard any law, constitutional tenet or congressional mandate to protect the American people.

Is that America's highest goal -- preventing another terrorist attack? Are there no principles of law and liberty more important than this? Who would have remembered Patrick Henry had he written, ``What's wrong with giving up a little liberty if it protects me from death?''

...we'd like to say a word in defense of the yokels Krugman mentions. Yokels go off to work every day, and then they have to take care of their children. They don't have time to analyze every nuance of every policy proclamation. When they hear pure bullroar again and again - and when they never hear it challenged - then only naturally, they'll start to think that the hokum is well-founded.

In a NYTimes article that should come as no surprise to the legal minds in the audience, defense counsel for a number of charged and convicted terrorism suspects are planning to challenge cases based on the latest revelations on the NSA spying domestically. To do less would be malpractice, because many of these defendants were American citizens, so this ought to be no shock to anyone who has spent time as defense counsel in criminal matters.

Did you know that "Overall, 90 percent of public employees enjoy a defined-benefit pension, compared with only 20 percent (and falling) of the private work force"? (Quote from Time magazine, 10/31/05 issue, "Where pensions are golden".)

When you are in your seventies, you will still be schlepping to work every day, so your taxes can fund the Caribbean cruise of some cop, subway motorman, or schoolteacher who retired at 55. How will you feel about that? Mad as hell, that's how. Inevitably, your mad-as-hell-ness will translate into politics sooner or later. Government people--enjoy it while you've got it. It won't last much longer.

Yes, that's right. Pensions are better than 401Ks. So you know what they should do? They should take away the pensions from government employees and give them the same crappy 401Ks they've been pawning off on us private sector employees. This is like Communism and capitalism working together. Instead of, oh, i dunno...fighting to scrap 401K and campaigning for everyone to get a pension they rightly deserve for working most of their adult life at some crappy job, Derbyshire and the rest of the pinheads want to make sure everyone has the same miserable deal and save the executives lots and lots of money. You great big wanker.

Josh Marshall and Mark Schmitt each predicted that the Social Security failure would haunt Bush, and crack Republican power. That didn't happen. I heard that the filibuster failure would cripple Frist. Nope. Delay's scandal would cause the House to descend into a 'Lord of Flies' style chamber. No. Lying to bring us to war, that would surely crumble his support. Not really. No weapons of mass destruction, come on, that's nuts, the American people wouldn't shrug that off. They did. Bribery in the prescription drug benefit. Eh, boring. The list is practically endless. In fact, at various points, liberal netroots-savvy experienced pundits have predicted that Bush and the right-wing's power was at a critical turning point, and would crack any second now. Reporters are really mad, they'd say, and will go after the President. But it just hasn't happened.

Why not? Many reasons. Go back to Peter's report, and read it. Powerful actors, like the top-down media, will not attack the President unless they think he's weak. But to make the case that he is weak, he must be treated with contempt, and that cannot happen when party leaders like Barack Obama simply refuse to act creatively and risk driving up their disapproval ratings. I ask, for instance, why in speeches is Obama saying that Bush is not a bad man? Why is he saying that Bush loves his country? How does that help us make the case that Bush is a liar and a fraud? It doesn't. It in fact undercuts our case, and the fact is, we are right and he is wrong, and it is important that our case base be made.

The obsession with Catholic Workers and Mao is *so* 1950s, and demonstrates that the administration doesn't really care about al-Qaeda and isn't even mainly using the act to combat that sort of terrorism. In fact, with all its powers, it is hard for the Federal government to point to any successful domestic investigation and prosecution of al-Qaeda-type terrorists in the US.

Update: The story about the student getting investigated for requesting a book on Mao was a hoax.

Earlier this week i congratulated Bolivia on their elections of Evo Morales. Today i read:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, speaking in an interview on CNN, said that if it's confirmed that Morales won the election, ``we will do what we do with every elected government, which is to say that we'll look to the behaviors of the Bolivian government to determine the course of U.S.-Bolivian relations.''

I wonder if Rice is equally concerned with the "behaviors" of the Ethiopian government, or the Columbian government, or the Uzbekistan government or many of our other allies who are known to commit actual atrocities that we could easily stop (as opposed to Morales, whose crime will be nationalizing Boliva's natural gas resources and legalizing growth of cocoa.)

Meanwhile, the much celebrated elections in Iraq seem to be resulting in their predicted outcome. We've essentially handed Iraq to Iran, as expected. Our allies got no votes.

The Los Angeles Times reports that the secular Iraqiya list of Iyad Allawi so far seems only to have 8% of the seats in the new parliament, though that tally may increase slightly when the 230,000 or so votes of expatriates are counted. (I doubt it will increase much). Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress did not get enough votes even to win a single seat, so far.

...

Cole: I think I pretty much nailed this election last October in this post (scroll down a bit). Note that I was often contradicted by observers on the ground in Iraq, who kept saying they perceived a groundswell for the secular party of Allawi, even in the Shiite-dominated provinces. This allegation never made any sense to me. Michael Rubin of the AEI was predicting 5 percent for Chalabi (the neocon favorite) and 20 percent for Allawi, a prediction that demonstrates that after 2 1/2 years the neocons still just can't understand anything about contemporary Iraq.

R.J. Eskow shreds the Neocon vision of what Iraq would become to pieces. Iraq is going to be pro-Iran, and will not recognize Israel (Muqtada al-Sadr will be part of the ruling coalition!) The 38 Sadrist parliamentarians and the 50 or so Sunni ones will form a powerful bloc calling for immediate US withdrawal from Iraq.

We used to be so good at this sort of thing. Now we can't even keep Latin America under our thumb, let alone invade other countries and install puppets properly.

Speaking of elections, though, here's what's going on in our own country:

Thompson said in a real race between candidates someone could pre-load 50 votes for Candidate A and minus 50 votes for Candidate B, for example. Candidate B would need to receive 100 votes before equaling Candidate A's level at the start of the race. The total number of votes on the machine would equal the number of voters, so election officials wouldn't become suspicious.

"It's self-destroying evidence," he said. "Once ... the machine gets past zero and starts counting forward for Candidate B, there's no record that at one point there were negative votes for Candidate B."

Thompson said a second vulnerability in the cards makes it easy to program the voting machine so that it thinks the card is blank at the start of the race. This is important because before voting begins on Election Day, poll workers print a report of vote totals from each machine to show voters that the machines contain no votes . . . .

While many of you might be happy that the union is considering asking its workers to go back to work while they continue negotiations with the MTA because now your lives will stop being inconvenienced and you will be able to go to work and go shopping and go to restaurants, consider this paragraph from the New York Times:

Some striking workers hinted they were having second thoughts. They said they live paycheck to paycheck, burdened with mortgages, many with children and ailing relatives to care for. Some said they had begun to wonder if they would be the ones to lose the most.

So instead, they are being urged (or, more accurately, demanded) to return to work and forego their fight for a decent pension, so that when they get older, they can be a burden on their children. Capitalism in a nutshell.

A few years ago we were at an anti-WTO protest marching towards the Waldorf Hotel where the organization was meeting. We were travelling down our march route based on the permit the protest organizers had acquired from the city. The protest routes are usually long and winding and not very direct due to the permitting, and at one point we were passing a street that led directly to the hotel. There was a middle aged man, walking alone in the march and when we reached that street, he started shouting that we should go down this street instead of following the route. No one listened to him. I've always suspected that he was a cop trying to get the protestors to break the law. This New York Times article is about how NY police have been infiltrating protests.

I like Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres. I really do. They're out there in impoverished countries, war-torn areas, places that have been hit by a natural disaster providing medical aid to anyone who needs it, regardless of political leaning, race, religion, or creed. Not only do they provide emergency care, but they are also there for the long haul. They run clinics and hospitals and rehabilitation centers. In places where people might not be getting the medical treatment they need because of cultural taboos or financial restrictions, Doctors Without Borders is there. And unlike the American Red Cross, seem to be free of political agendas and motivations and are not out to make a profit.

Every month more than 100 women overcome the taboos surrounding sexual violence to make their way to the clinic, where the sign outside reads Seruka, or "rise from darkness".

Not only are they trying to prevent the spreading of HIV, they are helping women to overcome the cultural taboo of speaking about rape. They provide a place for these women to turn to in a society that doesn't even have a word for rape. So i'm feeling very warm and fuzzy towards Doctors Without Borders right now. *gush gush*

In an article on the recent ruling against "intelligent design", one of the supporters of ID said, "The founders of this country would be astonished at the thought that this simple curriculum change established religion in violation of the Constitution that they drafted."

Let's try and resolve this business about what would astonish the founders.

Let's start with the basics. You often hear "this country was founded on the principals of Christianity". It wasn't. It was founded on the philosophy of the Enlightenment. This was a time period when people were challenging the established religious and political hierarchy. The founding fathers were, for the most part, Deists. They believed in what's called the Clockmaker theory, which is that some supreme being created the world using complex but discoverable scientific laws, and then left his creation alone to work on its own accord. This is hardly Christianity. Check out this site for an explanation of Deism, and this page in particular for some quotes from the founding fathers on religion.

So the fundamentalists have it wrong. "Separation of Chuch and State" was very much on our founders minds, and teaching religion in a science class would have repulsed them. Some of them were in fact scientists, and far from being astonished that religion wouldn't be taught in a science class, this was their intentention.

So i was in the cafeteria happily eating my sandwich and enjoying (or not) these Alan Moore written WildCATS comics, when one of the loudmouths a few tables over starting yelling at his co-worker because he was upset about the Bush spying thing. He was saying that since Bush only ordered spying on international calls, it was ok. It's not, without FISA oversight, but even besides that, that isn't what was happening. So i got angry, ended my lunch early, came upstairs, and printed this article with the intention of giving it to the guy. But then i wimped out. He was talking about New York Times "propaganda" and how they were wrong to print the original article because what Bush was doing was "top secret" and i figure he's unswayable, but i should have done it anyway. i'm just too much of a weenie.

From the article:

A surveillance program approved by President Bush to conduct eavesdropping without warrants has captured what are purely domestic communications in some cases, despite a requirement by the White House that one end of the intercepted conversations take place on foreign soil, officials say.

...

Telecommunications experts say the issue points up troubling logistical questions about the program. At a time when communications networks are increasingly globalized, it is sometimes difficult even for the N.S.A. to determine whether someone is inside or outside the United States when making a cellphone call or sending an e-mail message. As a result, people that the security agency may think are outside the United States are actually on American soil.

One of the judges on the FISA Court resigned in protest because Bush was bypassing the FISA Court. I don't get that. I can understand resigning from a position where you are asked to support a policy you don't agree with (like if Colin Powell were the hero everyone thinks he is and if he resigned as Sec. State in protest of the invasion of Iraq), but isn't resigning from a Court that Bush feels he doesn't need to report to just giving Bush more power?

Barbara Boxer, US Senator, has sent a letter to four presidential scholars, asking if Bush can be impeached based on former Nixon lawyer John Dean saying that Bush just admitted to an "impeachable offense."

Now we just have to convince enough of the "acceptable conversation" people (see below) to vote for democrats in 2007, and then give the democrats enough spine to actually impeach Bush and Cheney. And then Nancy Pelosi becomes President.

Steve Gilliard has some coverage of the MTA/TWU strike in NYC, here, here, and here.

Like i always say with these things, if these guys are "paid too much already" then why are you so terrified when they threaten to go on strike. They're clearly performing a vital service and deserve to be well compensated for it. Paying blue collar workers well is also good for the economy because it ensures there is a middle class (unless you'd like to be more like Bolivia, with a huge gap between the rich and the poor?).

Oh, and if you're working in some cubicle somewhere thinking you're better than these guys because you're a white collar professional...? In real dollars, you're not making any more money than union workers were back in the 50s. But we let unions get weak and wages have been declining since the mid-70s and now you have to pay for 4+ years of college to make that same amount of money. So you should be rooting for these guys, because if they win and it encourages unions to start standing up for themseleves again, and if it encourages more people to unionize, everybody wins. Except maybe Wal-mart.

Congratulations to Bolivia and Evo Morales for continuing the trend of electing anti-neoliberal leftists. Be careful. You'll have to walk the line of resisting the US funded dissent in your country enough that you don't get overthrown but not so much that you turn into a human rights violator like Castro. It won't be easy, and they know it.

They were tapping phone lines to protect us from the terrorists. The terrorist vegans and environmentalists and Catholics. It makes you want to say to the Libertarians in the Republican Party ""Suzy Creamcheese, honey, what's got into you?"

Audience member: We've got to give the President the flexibility to protect me. I use my cell phone al lthe time and I don't have any problem with the folks listening to the conversations I have because they're appropriate conversations.

Ultimate Christian Wrestling is like any other pro-wrestling bout you might see on a Saturday night in rural Georgia," Tapper says. "Except the characters and story lines come to a dramatic climax at the end of the show straight out of the Book of Revelation: At the end of this show, dozens of folks in the audience said they
were called to accept Jesus into their hearts. It was quite a thing to behold."

This is what i'm talking about. All the "liberals" who supported Bush's war, and all the conservatives who now apologize for the lack of weapons of mass distruction and ties to terrorists in Iraq, say, "At least we took Saddam out. He was a bad guy and the world is better off without him." Not even getting into the cost of "taking him out" in terms of human lives, instability in the region, international law, our repuation, or the billions of dollars spent, especially in light of the fact that smarter UN Sanctions would have done the trick... there are so many bad guys out there that we could stop just by cutting their purse strings. Here's one example. Anyone in a position of influence (politicians, pundits, journalists) who took Bush at his word that he's interested in getting rid of evil dictators should be fired.

I have one question for the media. Why is everyone so impressed that Bush is taking responsibility for going into Iraq? Has there ever been any question about that? We know he made the decision. He has made a fetish of taking responsibility for doing it. indeed, we watched him do it in defiance of virtually the whole world and half the country. This is not an admission of a mistake.

Likewise, admitting that there were no WMD is like admitting that the sun came up this morning. It's true, yes, but saying it is not "candor" --- it's stating the obvious.

Saying that the intelligence was wrong is not taking responsibility for getting it wrong. We know it was wrong.

Well, now we know where Junior gets his ideas from (see the total insanity from Bush that min put in our header). But Bush's handlers must be so frustrated. They give him the talking point that Cheney is pushing below, and the best Bush can come up with is that stumbled nonsense.

From ABC Nightline with Terry Moran:

"Moran: Before the war you said Americans would be greeted as liberators here, and yet your own trip here today was undertaken in such secrecy that not even the prime minister of this country knew you were coming, and your movements around are in incredible secrecy and security. Do you ever think about how and why you got it wrong?

"Cheney: I don't think I got it wrong. I think the vast majority of the Iraqi people are grateful for what the U.S. did. I think they believe overwhelmingly that they're better off today than they were when Saddam Hussein ruled."

See? It's nothing new. What, people really thought Cato was a respectable think-tank? Who is that gullible?

The revelation has caused Bandow to resign from Cato. But Ferrara, who is now at the Institute for Policy Innovation, says "I do that all the time," Ferrara says. "I've done that in the past, and I'll do it in the future."

Of course, relying on an article published only on Counterpunch and Truthout is setting myself up for dashed expectations, but you can't resist a lede like this:

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald met with the grand jury investigating the leak of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson for several hours Friday. Short of a last minute intervention by Rove's attorney, Fitzgerald is expected to ask a grand jury-possibly as soon as next week--the to indict Rove for making false statements to the FBI and Justice Department investigators in October 2003, lawyers close to the case say.
Moreover, Fitzgerald is said to believe that there is a possibility Rove either hid or destroyed evidence related to his role in the leak, lawyers close to the case said.

[12:47] fnord12: the Washington Post, following an interview with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, reports that the Democratic Party's 2006 election issue agenda "will not include a position on Iraq."
[12:47] min1276: wow.
[12:47] min1276: their stupidity is just incredible

"A senior fellow at the Cato Institute resigned from the libertarian think tank on Dec. 15 after admitting that he had accepted payments from indicted Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff for writing op-ed articles favorable to the positions of some of Abramoff's clients."

This is what they do for a living. Is anyone really shocked by this? Did he really have to resign to keep up the facade?

First it hurts my brain because it's about the evolution vs. ID debate. Mostly, it hurts my brain because this headline doesn't convey what the article seems to be about.

"Judges ask tough questions in evolution sticker case"

It mentions a comment the judge makes regarding the ruling of a lower court judge. That's it. It doesn't really talk about "tough questions". There were no "questions" per se mentioned. And i fail to see the "toughness" of it.

Granted, this particular headline is hardly the worst offender. Usually, headlines during presidential campaigns or about which Bushee is being indicted next are the most misleading. This headline is just inaccurate and prolly designed to be as attention grabbing as possible without outrageously misrepresenting the article's content. Blech.

Italy is sticking with their plan to withdraw their troops. The U.S. is starting to make noise about withdrawing troops over the next year, or at least reducing the number of troops there. Britain, on the other hand, is planning on sending 4,800 troops to Afghanistan to "wipe out the world's most lucrative opium trade and bring democracy, stability and protection to souther Afghanistan." This article points out that it's starting to look like Britain is going to be the chump at the end of it all.

Bush doesn't like to lose, though. And he's completely irrational. So, even if other people's kids are getting killed everyday in Iraq, why should he back down? I suppose it's possible that the rest of Bush & Co. (the ones who aren't totally off their rocker) might either cajole him into accepting it or convince him that he has won. I could believe either tactic possible. They may have to endure some pouting over it all, though.

Ofc, now with his defeat in getting Congress to back down on the torture ban, he might be feeling a bit too petulant at the moment to be cajoled. Well, they've got all year to work on him. All they have to do is make sure they don't allow soldiers to leave when their contract is over. That should buy them some time. If all else fails, they could try distracting him with a horsie.

"the Vipers were a Cobra unit on the GIJoe cartoon as far as i'm concerned." - Rod

Ah, not so, my friend. VIPERs are actually a new unit of air marshalls and undercover law enforcement officials who will be hanging out at mass transit facilities to protect us from the terrorists.

It may just be me, but i think that after the Miami incident mebbe some of us are a bit uncomfortable with the thought of air marshalls flooding the mass transit stations. I'm a bit concerned with what instructions they were given and exactly how much training they have regarding possible bomber situations? I don't know about you, but i sure as hell don't want to get shot in the head while reaching into my coat for a tissue cause the Fuzz thinks i did it in a shady way.

Also, i'm pretty sure i checked the box that said "No, I would like very much to not live in a police state, please."

At a moment when renewal of the so-called Patriot Act is a hot issue in the Senate, this story about the Pentagon keeping records on peaceful anti-war protestors could not be a better example of why the Patriot Act is a bad idea.

The Palm Beach Post reports on The Truth Project of Lake Worth, Florida, one of the groups considered a threat according to the Talon database. The group consists of about 20 people, including five Quakers and a 79-year old grandmother.

Beware the Quakers. They're a militant bunch. And that grandmother thing? A total front.

As some of you know, I think of WalMart as the devil. They pay their employees poorly, they coerce their employees into working overtime and then try to get out of paying them for it, and they are a megamart that drives out local business. Not to mention the Evangelical (read "politics disguised as religion") policies behind their decisions of what to sell in their stores. Well, here is yet another reason to love WalMart:

One student "had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb's down sign with his own hand next to the President's picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster."
An employee in that Wal-Mart photo department [where the student took his film to be developed],called the Kitty Hawk police on the student. And the Kitty Hawk police turned the matter over to the Secret Service.

The anti-revolution lyrics in the Beatles song Revolution have always seemed odd to me. In this interview, Lennon explains. Sort of.

JL: Ah, sure, 'Revolution' . There were two versions of that song but the underground left only picked up on the one that said 'count me out'. The original version which ends up on the LP said 'count me in' too; I put in both because I wasn't sure. There was a third version that was just abstract, musique concrete, kind of loops and that, people screaming. I thought I was painting in sound a picture of revolution--but I made a mistake, you know. The mistake was that it was anti-revolution.

On the version released as a single I said 'when you talk about destruction you can count me out'. I didn't want to get killed. I didn't really know that much about the Maoists, but I just knew that they seemed to be so few and yet they painted themselves green and stood in front of the police waiting to get picked off. I just thought it was unsubtle, you know. I thought the original Communist revolutionaries coordinated themselves a bit better and didn't go around shouting about it. That was how I felt--I was really asking a question. As someone from the working class I was always interested in Russia and China and everything that related to the working class, even though I was playing the capitalist game.

No matter how aggressive the press gets in challenging Bush on issues where it is now acceptable, i would never have expected them to challenge the official government line that Chavez is anything other than a dictator; a Castro-lite.

QUESTION: Okay. The elections in Venezuela, do you have a reaction to those, please? The overwhelming sweep by Mr. Chavez's party.

MR. ERELI: Yeah. I'd note that the Organization of American States and European Union both have observer missions that were there for these elections. They have yet to make their reports or make their statements, so I'd hold off on any sort of final assessment until conferring with them.

At this point, just to make a couple of remarks. First of all, the abstention rate was very high. Second of all, you know, given that rate of abstention, plus expressions of concerns by prominent Venezuelans, we see -- we would see that this reflects a broad lack of confidence in the impartiality and transparency of the electoral process, which is worth noting. And we would certainly look to Venezuela to address the issues of transparency and impartiality for the benefit of Venezuelan democracy.

QUESTION: Isn't that a bit of a reach? Fifty percent of the people in this country don't vote. You just don't like Venezuela very much.

MR. ERELI: I think the abstention -- there are about 25 percent participated in this.

QUESTION: Well, we don't have a terrific turn out here in this country. You're not going to congratulate the winners or anything like that?

MR. ERELI: Well, again as I said, let's wait to see what the observer missions have to say.

QUESTION: Thank you.

QUESTION: Do you think President Chavez is making any PR progress in this country with the announcement expected tomorrow that now some New York neighborhoods will be taking his discounted heating oil?

So after Bush got in office everyone was saying "See, there really are differences between Bush and Gore. Nader was crazy." While no one could have predicted Osama Bin Laden's attacks (except for the people who wrote the report "Bin Laden Determined to Attack in the US), which is what allowed Bush to really fly off the handle, his basic point was more or less right. In these past 5 years the majority of Democrats have supported Bush's tax cuts and his wars. But the point is really highlighted by the fact that Gore's running mate is now being considered as Bush's next Secretary of Defense.